The Los Angeles Times has been presenting a series of investigative stories on the death and corruption in Mexico’s drug war.  This latest piece asks various experts from Mexico, Latin America, and the US what they would do to help end the violence of the Mexican drug cartels:

Terry Nelson - Federal agent for 30 years with the U.S. Border Patrol, the Customs Service and the Department of Homeland Security

Despite the obvious failure of our drug control strategy, the public discourse surrounding this issue has focused primarily on continuing to wage the “drug war.”

We won’t be able to expand treatment and prevention efforts until we stop spending so much money enforcing ineffective penalties, building new prisons and buying fancy cars and helicopters for law enforcement agencies. As we begin to treat problematic drug use as a public health issue, it will become much easier to prevent the death, disease and addiction that have expanded under the criminal justice mentality of prohibition.

My years of experience as a federal agent tell me that legalizing and effectively regulating drugs will stop drug market crime and violence by putting major cartels and gangs out of business.

If what we’ve been doing worked at all, we wouldn’t be battling Mexican drug dealers in our own cities or anywhere else. There’s one surefire way to bankrupt them, but when will our leaders talk about it?

Alejandro Gonzalez Iñarritu – Mexican film director (“Babel,” “21 Grams” and “Amores Perros”)

I have always thought that the only possible way to eradicate this plague is to legalize drugs. While the United States keeps consuming these amounts of drugs and selling guns the way it does, there’s no way our country will win this war.

Once the tons of drugs cross the border into the U.S., there has to be a huge web of people involved in distributing and selling all these drugs. Where are these people? Who are they? Where are these “American cartels” and their leaders?

Fernando Rospigliosi – Former interior minister of Peru

The narco-trafficking problem in Peru has gotten worse in all aspects: the production of cocaine, violence and the corruption that comes from that. One of the aggravating factors was the launching of the [U.S.-financed] Plan Colombia, which started to work in the last decade and that has unleashed greater demand for Peruvian coca and cocaine. In addition, you have the increasingly strong entrance of Mexican cartels into Peru, and they have brought a kind of violence never before seen here.

Sergio Fajardo – Former mayor of Medellin, Colombia

The doors into the drug world are very wide for the unemployed and the youth living in the poor barrios. You have to close or reduce the size of that doorway. How do you do that? With opportunities, creating jobs in those barrios with education and by establishing the state’s presence in each community. We learned that many who entered criminality because they had no opportunity will return to society if they can go to work.

Examining the US-Mexico Gun Trade – International Business News – Portfolio.com
When Americans think about the border, they tend to picture undocumented workers or clandestine river crossings. They don’t think about war. But what’s happening in Mexico now is a war—no other word seems suitable—and the most gruesome battles are taking place within miles of the U.S.?So far this year, more than 1,350 people have been murdered in drug-trafficking-related crimes in Mexico. Last year, according to tallies kept by Mexican newspapers, 2,500 people died; since 2001, the number is close to 10,000—twice the number of American soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan.

These killings have become such an everyday part of life that there’s a special word for them: narcoejecuciones, or narcoexecutions. The murdered include police, judges, prosecutors, soldiers, reporters, politicians, and innocent bystanders. Shootouts in broad daylight, mass executions, and public assassinations have become routine.

There are, in fact, two drug wars raging in Mexico. One is between drug-trafficking organizations—in particular, the Sinaloa cartel and its main rival, the Gulf cartel—over control of smuggling routes to the U.S.?The belligerence is easily understood, given the stakes. The U.S. government estimates that the cross-border drug trade was worth as much as $25 billion last year. According to Mexico’s attorney general, Eduardo Medina Mora, $10 billion worth of drug proceeds crosses from the U.S. into Mexico each year in the form of bulk cash.

The other war is between the government and the cartels. Mexican presidents have pledged to end trafficking before, but [President] Calderón, who took office in 2006, seems, in contrast to his predecessors, to be sincere, and his policies are having some effect. He has dispatched tens of thousands of troops, locked up hundreds of traffickers, and undertaken sweeping reforms of the police and judiciary. With each salvo, however, the violence intensifies. The wars aren’t just Mexico’s problem, either. The U.S., with less than 5 percent of the world’s population, consumes more than half of the world’s drugs; most of the marijuana and methamphetamine, much of the heroin, and 90 percent of the cocaine comes from or through Mexico. “U.S. consumers are already financing this war,” Medina Mora tells me, “only it’s on the wrong side.”

In late 2007, the Bush administration, which counts Calderón as one of its few friends in Latin America, announced the Mérida Initiative. If passed by Congress, it will provide Mexico with $1.4 billion in equipment and training over three years. But the initiative, with its unprecedented outlay of funds, is fraught with contradictions, since it would go to fight the flow of weapons coming in illegally from the U.S. More than 90 percent of the A.T.F.’s traces of guns seized in Mexico lead to the States. The Mexican ambassador recently estimated that 2,000 guns cross the border every day. Even if that figure is halved, it’s a trade worth hundreds of millions of dollars a year.

So prohibition of cannabis fuels the profit in trafficking marijuana across the border. With those profits, traffickers finance the flow of easily-purchased guns over the border. Our prohibitionary policies are funding the execution of innocent Mexicans and arming the executioners. Were it legal, Americans would buy, sell, and grow domestically and completely undercut the profits of these murderers as well as destroy much of their business. If Mexico followed suit their poor farmers could grow vast fields of industrial hemp or fine connoisseur cannabis, and some of those trafficking in the border drug war could turn into legit import/exporters.

But a prohibitionist will tell you the blood is on the hands of the US recreational marijuana smoker. Why, if only nobody smoked cannabis, nobody in Mexico would have to die! Because the prohibitionist sees the world in black and white and “Just say no” makes sense to him or her. The fact that humans used cannabis for thousands of years and will continue to use it despite all prohibitions doesn’t come up.  It’s evil and it must be eliminated, they think, and any idea of accepting evil in the name of harm reduction is unthinkable.

Besides, from a business point-of-view, unlimited funding for a project whose goal is to eliminate something that cannot be eliminated sounds like a pretty good profit-making venture for law enforcement, private prisons, and gun manufacturers.